Greedy Goblin

Monday, June 9, 2014

Irrelevant

"Irrelevant" must be the favorite word of Goons. And of socials in general. It is an excuse why they don't even try to make difference. You are irrelevant. No matter what you do, it won't make any difference. So stop trying and just have fun!

Goons are busy calling my GRR project irrelevant. One even cooked up a calculation that the average CFC member lost an assault frigate worth of assets to the project, which is irrelevant. It made me check the losses on the zkillboard statistics page of Goons and minions for the first 5 months of 2014:

Here you can compare their losses against the GRR project with their total losses. Well, doing nearly 1/3 of the damage to Bastion is funny, but the overall performance is 6.4%. If you look at the months (bottom box), you can see that in January, CFC had extraordinary high losses due to B-R while the project had its lowest damage due to its newborn state. In the rest of the months we did 7.8% of the damage on average.

Let's look at the line in the bottom: "Member equivalent"! What is it? I added the member count of CFC, renters and RvB and got 47200 pilots. If you kill 5% of a 20 men gang, you killed one guy. So I multiplied 47200 with the % of the GRR damage. The result is the number of pilots whose losses can be attributed to the project. Outside of January, thats around 4000.

Socials like to think about groups and say "we did X". But the bee icon won't grind structures or defeat enemy fleets. Members do. I'm an individual, I shouldn't be compared to groups, I should be compared to members. Apples to apples. Now, you can twist the numbers as you like, compare this 4000 CFC guys to my alt count, or to Marmite_and_Lemming_pilots * CFC_kills / total_kills. But no matter how do you calculate the GRR_member_effect/CFC_member_effect, you get numbers way over 100.

We can't give an exact definition for "relevant", so I can't say "I'm relevant in EVE". But I can say without doubt that I'm more than a hundred times more relevant than an average CFC member. And I'm fine with that.

Now imagine that I would have a thousand real world clones who do everything like I do. Than the anti-CFC forces would get 9-10 trillion ISK support every week. Yes, that's the cost of B-R every week. CFC would be destroyed in a few months, since everyone in N3/PL could ride a handout titan. That version of the GRR project would obviously be very relevant. But me, the individual, would do the exact same thing as now, therefore I would be exactly as relevant as now.

No individual will turn the World upside down. Not even the small world of New Eden. But you can contribute to its fate 100x more than a social who is happy with "hanging out and having fun". You can make difference, just stop seeing yourself as a cog in the machine, a mere member of a group. Stop trying to influence "important people", start being important!

One thing for sure, for the average losses being as they are, the CFC must have a shitton of inactives.

Since we are entering an era of cold war, covertly funding groups to harass the other sides' members and especially renters seems like a good plan. I wonder if the powerblocs are already picking up on this. At least NC has theirs laid out for them with your project.

No, this is consequentialism. Regardless of whether it was done by an individual or a group, only the results matter. The CFC is relevant because of what they do, regardless of how many thousands they have among their number. Until you can reach their level of results, you won't be in the same league as them.

@Gevlon: "but no one is CFC. No man can point at any CFC results and say "hey look I've done it". He can only say "look, I have 0.02% part in that thing"!

So this is all about ego then? That most powerful of ape subroutines, the feeling that others must recognise your greatness, and that you must show you are better than everyone else, and get your name up in lights, carved in stone, or otherwise entered into the annals of history.

Some might say the most important people are the ones you have never heard of. Sure, a general had an awesome battle plan, or an entrepreneur had an awesome business plan, but, good luck to either of them rising to dominance solo

@a very confused anon: "No, this is consequentialism. Regardless of whether it was done by an individual or a group, only the results matter"

If you truly believed in consequentialism, you wouldn't be playing, or commenting on, a video game; as both of the above lack real world consequences(although paying a subscription fee has a small consequence, actually playing the game does not). Video games are an abstraction of real world conflict, as all play is, and by engaging in or discussing them, you are implicitly supporting the idealistic, anti-consequential theory that abstraction and ideas matter.

@Gevlon: "No man can point at any CFC results and say "hey look I've done it". He can only say "look, I have 0.02% part in that thing"!"

The leaders of CFC have much more than 0.02% part, and the average player has less than 0.02% part. I imagine you're well aware of this and merely spoke inexactly?

@Gevlon:"but that makes the line members even less important, and it's an even bigger reason for one to avoid being a line member."

Obviously I'm not suggesting that you become a line member. The real debate is between the positions:

A: Recruit the M&S to join one's coalition, and use them to crush your enemies.

B: Attempt to educate/eradicate the M&S.

C: (Everything else, which I'm not going to discuss here for *reasons*).

Obviously A and B have not only different methodology but different goals, so naively applying *consequentialism* is a nonstarter, even if one avoids the logical pitfalls of the confused Anon above. But comparing being a free agent to being a line member is not a fair comparison. The large coalitions contain line members, middle management, and leaders; to only consider the first case is to aim your argument very low.

Consequentialism depends on arbitrary definitions of what is and is not a positive outcome, but within those definitions it is perfectly functional.

If an outcome is deemed important, regardless of how much it is or is not an abstraction of something else, then any events or actions that are better able to bring about that outcome is superior according to consequentialism. Why such a result should be important is another debate entirely.

you are missing one important point. there cannot and will not be 1000 of you for the simple reason that if there were you would not be able to make the same amount of isk from the trade as you would have to compete with your 999 clones over the market. as for other sources of income the high sec is not able to generate this much in such a short period of time. yes i know you competeover the market now but i do not think there is enough room for 1000 goblins trading to the same extent in this game.